The Great Bathroom Panic Is Getting Very Expensive for Taxpayers

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where, if he needs a third eye, he just grows one.

We begin in the now consistently insane state of North Carolina, and there's so much going on that we never may get out of there. First, the Department of Justice has explained to Governor Pat McCrory and his pet legislature (Art Pope, prop.) that the Urinal Cooties Protection Act of 2016 is going to be costing them even more money. According to The Charlotte Observer:

The letter says HB2, which pre-empted Charlotte's anti-discrimination ordinance, violates Title IX, which bars discrimination in education based on sex, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination. If the finding is upheld, North Carolina could lose federal education funding. During the current school year, state public schools received $861 million. In 2014-2015, the University of North Carolina system got $1.4 billion.

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Of course, the usual suspects are howling and trying to raise the ghost of Albert Sidney Johnson.

Speaking to business leaders Wednesday night, McCrory called the letter "something we've never seen regarding Washington overreach in my lifetime." "This is no longer just a N.C. issue. This impacts every state, every university and almost every employee in the United States of America," he said. "All those will have to comply with new definitions of requirements by the federal government regarding restrooms, locker rooms and shower facilities in both the private and public sector." GOP lawmakers also criticized the Justice Department—and President Barack Obama. House Speaker Tim Moore, who said the GOP leaders are consulting attorneys about a response, called the letter "a huge overreach (by) the federal government." "It looks an awful lot like politics to me," Moore, a Kings Mountain Republican, told reporters. "I guess President Obama, in his final months in office, has decided to take up this ultra-liberal agenda." Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger called the ruling "a gross overreach." And Lt. Gov. Dan Forest blasted the Obama administration. "To use our children and their educational futures as pawns to advance an agenda that will ultimately open those same children up to exploitation at the hands of sexual predators is, by far, the sickest example of the depths the … administration will stoop to (to) 'fundamentally transform our nation,'" he said.

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If you're keeping score at home, you will note that all this howling has been prompted by the denial to North Carolina of some of those sweet big-government dollars about which most of these people ordinarily would be railing. Nobody's talking about a federal veto of this state law. (James Madison would be in favor of that, but he's dead.) The government is simply saying, if you choose to discriminate, you can't make the rest of the country pay for your bigotry. Get rid of the UCPA '16 and the federal dollars begin to flow again.

Oh, what's that? You might be in political trouble back home if the federal spigot gets shut off? Sorry. Liberty is a tough room.

Elsewhere, somebody has tossed the pension fund for North Carolina state employees onto the no-limit table of the Wall Street casino and a guy named Edward Tower at Duke has caught them. From HuffPost:

A recent study by Edward Tower, a professor of economics at Duke University, addressed the issue of whether the stocks in the North Carolina State Employees' Pension Fund should be actively or passively managed. This has become a political issue in the race for Treasurer of North Carolina. One candidate, R. Ron Elmer, has pledged to replace the active management of stock mutual funds, private equity, real estate funds, real estate partnerships, hedge funds and commodity funds with an index fund-based investment strategy, managed in-house. Professor Tower looked at how an indexing strategy would have impacted the state pension fund's past returns. His conclusion was staggering: "Our various calculations ... indicate indexing the equity part of the NC Pension fund would have increased returns by approximately $781 million per year (in the 3 years ending mid-2015), $2.492 billion per year (last 5 years to mid-2015), and $969 million per year (last 10 years to mid-2015). This is an increase in the return by between 0.87 percentage points/year and 2.78 percentage points/year."

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Meanwhile, as Bloomberg News informs us, Janet Cowell, the state's treasurer, and the person who's been plunking down the pension money in the big casino, has found a way to augment her income in such a way that almost nobody can anticipate any problems at all.

The treasurer, Janet Cowell, was elected to the board of James River Group Holdings, a Bermuda-based insurance company, after a vote by its shareholders on Tuesday. In late February, Cowell was voted onto the board of ChannelAdvisor Corp., an e-commerce company headquartered in Morrisville, N.C. Cowell, a former Lehman Brothers banker, was first elected treasurer in 2008 and has eight months left on her term. She is the sole overseer of North Carolina's $90 billion pension fund. She also administers the State Health Plan for public employees and chairs the State Banking Commission. The state fund doesn't hold investments in James River Group Holdings or ChannelAdvisor, according to a State Ethics Commission review.

So the person whose investment strategy for public pensions is under fire for being unusually risky is now on the board of a couple of financial services companies. Usually, to get a golden parachute, you have to jump—or get pushed, aka The Full Fiorina—out of the airplane first.

We escape under cover of dark money and find ourselves in Missouri, where the state government can't keep itself from meddling with ladyparts and the ladies who own them. From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Under the measure, voters would be asked if the state constitution should be amended to "protect pregnant women and unborn children by recognizing that an unborn child is a person with a right to life which cannot be deprived by state or private action without due process and equal protection of law."

What if the unborn child wants to exercise its Second Amendment rights? Does mom have to swallow a pistol? That sounds awful. Unintended consequences, people!

We scoot west and end up in Colorado, where there is an interesting ballot question looming in which private prisons are equated at law with slavery. Per RawStory:

Article 2 of the state constitution says that "there shall never be in this state either slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." And this clause is still used today to justify prisons run by corporations, according to representatives of the No Slavery, No Excuses campaign and the social justice group Together Colorado. "I think it is a travesty that there are corporations that are being allowed to prosper because of the punishment of an individual. That's out of sorts. That's out of balance," said Pastor Del Phillips of the Greater Denver Ministerial Alliance, at a January gathering of clergy trying to strike slavery from state law.

If they remove that clause, it is thought, the state's privatized prisons would lose the constitutional fig leaf behind which they can turn a buck on the labor of the incarcerated. I am going to be intrigued to see what sort of arguments are mustered in opposition. I'm sure that someone will come up with a horrible cannibal murderer who needs to be indentured to Giganto Prison Manufacturing, LLC. Punish them with capitalism so the rest of us can have inexpensive lawn furniture and leather goods.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where peripatetic Blog Official Culvert Spelunker Friedman of the Plains reports that Governor Mary Fallin has clambered aboard the Trump Train because why the hell not, she's the governor of Oklahoma. From The Tulsa World:

Her announcement came after Trump emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee. His victory in the Indiana primary on Tuesday led U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich to drop out of the race. Unlike Fallin, several Republican officials took the unusual step of criticizing their own party's likely nominee, some saying they'd never vote for a man known for insulting other candidates, reporters, illegal immigrants, women and Muslims while calling for a huge wall to be built on the southern border at Mexico's expense. "I'm behind Donald Trump 100 percent," Fallin said. "Our first and foremost goal is to elect a conservative president who will promote a pro-business climate to create good jobs and is strong on national defense.